AND YOU SEE, THIS IS WHAT IS SO BLINDINGLY FRUSTRATING TO ME...
AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING EGOTISTICAL (AW, FUCK IT) THIS IS A SUPERB POST...first-rate pithiness, it is wonderfully arch, has unnerving timeliness, is bitingly provocative, and absolutely accurate----and the record shows that only 16 people who saw it thought it was worth "reacting" to, and that perhaps they were the only people who saw it, and almost half of these are friends who literally (and endearingly) react and comment about almost everything I post....

What colluding causes exist that may be responsible for this limited audience/response I have frequently speculated on, but can not unequivocally name, and it is all pointless anyway, as none of my suppositions, all of which can be strongly supported, have any real remedies or prophylactic preemptions...The conclusion being that I just come away from this activity incredibly disheartened and demoralized, rueful of the past and the marginal, irrelevant, and powerless place it has left me, and the utter futility and waste evident in any expository effort that is not somehow entertaining in nature...(or possibly "confessional"---I still seem to garner interest when I remonstrate about health grievances or write about psycho-emotive treatment issues that give readers an opportunity to simultaneously offer succor/advice while stating their own righteous anger about shrinks, medicine in general, pharmaceuticals etc....)

And that is fine, I guess, as people really do need to be diverted these days, except I do not feel particularly fun and entertaining most of the time now and I grow weary of "group therapy sharing"---especially since I loathe group therapy and have avoided it for nearly my entire life....

And of course, ultimately, if Facebook's investor-renumerating, profit-driven algorithmic strategies weren't curating and severely limiting the visibility of millions of posts, including mine, and I still had the same relatively expansive reserves of interest to draw from which were available for my first seven years here, I wouldn't be writing this...Frustrating or discouraging aspects of social media interaction would still exist, but they would be regularly eclipsed by a diversity and an energy which would make my time spent here something analeptic and enlivening, rather then like an exercise in dissipation (---sans any hedonistic excess....)

Of late I have fallen back on a pattern that I have both advanced and refined over the years---a maneuver of both escape and discipline....It involves setting up a provisional "panel" in my head of perspectives, each one a different "voice", if not a persona, and introducing some subject---cultural, social, political, philosophic, historical, current, speculative about the future etc, and then launching a "multi-party" colloquy among the "group" with point/counterpoints, pros/cons, thesis/anthihesis, resoundingly important arguments wrapped in non-sequester clothing, complete myths and shibboleths of the ignorant and/or educated classes, both sincere or cynically held, with an elaborate tangent re-edited as a vital aside or a prolix pronouncement remade into succinct pith; in short, the kind of decathlon I would like to see every issue of great importance put through, but most often never do...

At various points in my past, this drill has been, to put it bluntly, a life-saver...At those moments when I have been trapped or (or dismissed or forsaken), or immobilized or enervated by the clinical: both physical or psychological, by the financial or by the geographic...or by all combined...these "conferences" kept my intellect at least honed and buffed, sometimes even sturdier than before..(how this provided a lifeline was endlessly confounding to those I knew from the therapy/self-help horde....they could not believe that any effort which did not involve the endless investigation and re-visiting of feelings, or more accurately, FEELINGS, might have any benefit worth mentioning...there again, I do not think most of these people had intellects to strengthen, hone OR buff)...

But such cerebral essays are not, actually, particularly useful at the moment...in fact, I begin to feel they are a bit harmful....By engaging in them, through reverse deduction, I start to consider my current situation as being more and more of a terrible trap, a likelihood I would rather not focus on...What makes these circumstances different than those in my earlier history is that, if they do constitute a trap, it is one that I shall never break free of....There can be some small adjustments for the sake of comfort, certainly, but it is a cage with a door-key which will only drop through the bars into the icy, pale palm of a hand splayed open in mortified rigor....This reality, with its attendant lifeless, scorched, radioactive desert where all things of the sapient mind are concerned, is loudly proclaimed whenever I reach the apogee of one of my mental "symposiums", my psyche no longer apparently able--or willing---to engage in such routines... fall formal dresses

But I am also reminded of it---in a subtler, quieter way---whenever I spend anything beyond the most perfunctory amount of time on Facebook....There is something nocuous here that did not exist before, which is less evident when my FB time is appreciably abbreviated....But knowing this is no great positive, as it only emphasizes just how desolate the current landscape is----every landscape...

But I am going to stop now. I do not feel like tagging this up, and as it is, I have invested too much effort and energy....for something that will be glanced at by ten people, maybe read by ten, reacted to by sixteen, and commented on by four....And the fact that the response will absolutely conform to my prediction is already making me want to turn the lights off and go back to sleep....these days are getting shorter, but they still do not seem short enough....